Here we go, the final season premiere. Will a new song be forever associated with LOST (in the spirit of "Make Your Own Kind of Music", "Downtown", and "Shotgun Willie"?) Will everyone get off the plane in Los Angeles? Will the new storytelling device be to show alternate timelines as flashes? Will the survivors return to 2007? 2004 after the crash?
Thankfully, I'm unspoiled and will find out in good time. Rather than trying to speculate, I'd rather write broadly about Season Six and what my expectations are. I embrace the reality that LOST will not answer every question it has posed, and that it would be folly to try. Nonetheless, I believe there are a number of questions that do beg for answers, namely (and in no particular order):
* What is the true nature of the Jacob/Black Robe conflict? Good v. Evil? Shades of gray? Are they gods, demigods, ageless mortals in the mold of Alpert?
* What destroyed the statue? Was it related to the pregnancy problems? And if not, what caused those?
* What is the history of the Hostiles/Others? Are they simply the people Jacob has drawn to the Island? What is their mission, and what is the Temple?
* What are the Whispers?
* Who are Adam and Eve?
* What is the Monster? More specifically, I don't need to know how a cloud of black smoke is sentient; I just need to understand its relationship to other forces on the Island and what it is judging? What is its moral code, so to speak?
For me, those are the major questions. If most of those questions are addressed adequately, then I will be very satisfied with LOST. There are many other questions that could be asked, and hopefully some will be answered, but the ones I'm really invested in are listed above.
Broadly, I would like the ending of the show to be spectacularly inconclusive. So many episodes of LOST have ended with myself and many other audience members scratching our heads and wondering what the heck we just watched. I'd like my immediate reaction to the final scene of the show to be "I wasted six years of my life obsessing about this television show to get THAT as a payoff?" The fun of LOST has always been theorizing and scrutinizing every little detail. What fun would it be if that was eviscerated by the ending of the show?
In order for LOST to be true to its own nature, it has to end with a question mark. I have faith that it will, and I believe that in the long haul, diehard LOST fans who don't agree with me now will.
